"Relativity"

This print "Relativity" was on my adolescent wall. It's a lithograph print by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher. It was first printed in December 1953. The lithograph depicts a world in which the normal laws of gravity do not apply. There are no less than three sources of gravity at play, each being orthogonal to the two others. Adding to this, there are sixteen faceless characters, spread between each gravity source. Each character lives in one of the gravity wells, where normal physical laws apply. The confusion of the print comes from the fact that the three gravity sources are depicted in the same space. The structure has seven stairways, and each stairway can be used by people who belong to two different gravity sources. This creates interesting phenomena, such as in the top stairway, where two inhabitants use the same stairway in the same direction and on the same side, but each using a different face of each step; thus, one descends the stairway as the other climbs it, even while moving in the same direction nearly side by side (just as in a workplace). In the other stairways, inhabitants are depicted as climbing the stairways upside-down, but based on their own gravity source, they are climbing normally. It's a lot of things to keep track on here. My spatial ability has never been the best. In my adolescence, I made futile attempts to follow a gravity well an try to determine exactly where it went over into another gravity well. Not anymore. I don't have the print in my possession anymore. And besides, the world is complicated as it is.